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Tutorial 23 - Implementing iAds with Codea | iOS Tutorial

HOw to add banner or full screen advertisements to your application

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Overview PAGE TOP

23.1 Introduction PAGE TOP

A common business model in the App store is to give away your app for free and generate revenue by serving ads to your application. This model has benefits but can annoy your users if done in excess. Everyone likes stuff that is free, so setting a zero cost removes most of the barriers to downloading your app and should maximise download numbers.

Since iOS 4.0 the iAds framework has been available for developers. Using this you can add banner or full screen advertisements to your application. If you are planning to include ads on a screen then you need to ensure that you have left space within your interface to display them. Full screen ads (referred to as interstitial ads by Apple) are only available on the iPad and are only suitable in certain situations, so we wont cover those in this tutorial.

You receive revenue when users view (called impressions) or click advertisements on your app. Some apps use a bit of social engineering to maximise their click through rate. For example the Foxtel (cable TV) app in Australia has ads which appear at the top of the channel selection screen. As per the Apple guidelines these ads are only displayed once the banner has been loaded from the ad server. When this occurs, the ad slides in from the top and moves the content down by the height of the banner. However what happens 50% of the time (for us at least) is that you accidentally tap the ad when you are trying to select a channel.

It is difficult to estimate exactly what revenue you might receive from including iAds in your app. A graph of the impressions that we got for the last year is shown below. There was about 98k in total with 90% coming from one app (Personality). According to Apple the effective revenue per thousand ads (eCPM) served over this period was $0.82. In practice, we get on average $0.25 per day. So while this may not be a get rich quick scheme, it is not bad passive income, particularly given the app I'm deriving revenue on is not optimised for ads.

We suspect you could do much better with a free game app with high reusability (people tend to use Personality only 2-3 times at best). Apple says that "hundreds of developers are making more than $15,000 per quarter". Given that there are 275,000 iOS developers in the US alone, this is perhaps not that impressive - albeit not all of those developers have iAd enabled apps.

23.2 Banner Views PAGE TOP

From a Codea perspective, implementing iAds is easy. If you are happy to display ads on every screen then you just need to leave the appropriate amount of space on your screen to display the ad. In most cases there will be screens that you don't want to display ads on (e.g. the main game screen), so we have extended Codea Lua with a function, showBannerAd(true) to turn ads on and off. For our example, we will only display ads on the Menu and High Score screens.

For completeness, the iPhone banner sizes are 320 x 50 points for a portrait advertisement and 480 x 32 points for a landscape advertisement.

The banner ads are intended to typically appear either at the top or bottom of the display and are provided in two formats so that ads may be displayed when the device is either in portrait or landscape orientation.

23.3 Setup iAds in iTunes Connect PAGE TOP

As with Achievements and in-App purchasing, there are some things that you need to enable in iTunes Connect before your app will be able to receive ads from Apple's servers. Log in to your developer account, select iTunes Connect and then click on Manage your Apps. Click on the appropriate App icon and then click on the Setup iAds link (right hand side towards the top).

Answer the question regarding whether the primary target audience for your app is users under 17 years of age and then click Enable iAds and Save.

That's it! You can disable iAds just as simply but changes to your iAd settings will not take effect until your next app version is approved.

23.4 Creating Your Banner Views in the Codea runtime PAGE TOP

You should only create a banner view when you intend to display it to the user. Otherwise, it may cycle through ads and deplete the list of available advertising for your application. As a corollary to this, avoid keeping a banner view around when it is invisible to the user. To demonstrate the implementation of iAds in the runtime we will use our old faithful MineSweeper application.

Based on our careful UI planning (or perhaps just through good luck) we happen to have enough space at the top of the MineSweeper Menu screen to fit in a banner ad, so that is where we will put it. As MineSweeper is now a universal application we will need to handle the iPhone sized banners as well. We have more room at the bottom of the iPhone Menu screen when it is in the portrait orientation, so when we detect that device and orientation we will place the banner at the bottom of the view. There is no room for a banner on an iPhone in landscape orientation, so we will disable ads when we detect this combination.

Banner views use a delegate to communicate with your application. Your application will thus need to implement a banner view delegate to handle common events. In particular we need to handle:

when the user taps the banner.

when the banner view loads an advertisement.

when the banner view encounters an error.

Usually you would place this code in the relevant view controller but for simplicity we will handle this in the CodifyAppDelegate (the alternative is to extend the BasicRendererViewController class in the runtime).

If your application supports orientation changes, your view controller must also change the banner view’s size when the orientation of the device changes.

Step 1 - Add the iAd Framework to your App.

Fire up Xcode and load the runtime version of your Codea application. Click on the CodeaTemplate file at the top of the project navigator then in the summary tab, scroll down to the linked libraries area. Click on the "+" button below your existing frameworks to add a new framework. Find iAds and click on "Add".

Step 2 - Update the CodifyAppDelegate Files.

In CodifyAppDelegate.h you need to import the framework you just added using:

#import <iAd/iAd.h>

then modify the class interface definition so that it looks like this:

This indicates that the ADBannerViewDelegate protocol will be implemented. We will provide a link to download the updated CodifyAppDelegate files below. We have added two other things to the CodifyAppDelegate files:

A boolean instance variable called displayingAds which is controlled from your Lua code via the modified aGameCenter_Codea class; and

A call back method called iAdDisplayStatusChanged which is used to update the banner view if the MineSweeper game state or orientation changes. This also comes via the modified aGameCenter_Codea class.

Step 3 - Update the other Codea runtime Files.

As we saw in Tutorial 19 when integrating Game Center, there are changes required in LuaState.m, OSCommands.h and OSCommands.m, to allow Lua to communicate with our Objective C code. This mostly comprises registering our new showBannerAd(true or false) function.

In LuaState.m add the following to the - (void) create method:

//iAds Function
LuaRegFunc(showBannerAd);

In OSCommands.h add the following below the similar Game Center definitions:

//iAds
int showBannerAd(struct lua_State *L);

Finally, in OSCommands.m add the following method below the Game Center definitions:

23.5 Codea Lua Code Changes PAGE TOP

As mentioned in section 23.2, if you are happy to display adds on every screen then there is no changes required to your Lua code (assuming you left space for the ads). If like us you want to select when ads are displayed, then you need to use the new showBannerAd() function. If you pass true in this function then ads will be displayed and if you pass false, they wont.

As an example, the following shows our updated orientationChanged() function.

function orientationChanged(newOrientation)
print("Orientation Change Detected.")
if setupHasRun and gameState == stateRun or gameState == stateWon or
gameState == stateLost then
updateGridLocation()
end
if setupHasRun and (gameState == stateMenu or gameState == stateScore) then
showBannerAd(true)
else
showBannerAd(false)
end
end

We also use showBannerAd() when the gameState changes due to button taps.

The other class we need to modify is the SpashScreen. In the fadeAnimation call back, we turn on ads once the splash screen has faded away.

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